The transit lounge is the archetypal transit space, the point where the hyper-global + hyper-local coincide; a location which blurs traditional conceptions of geo-political boundaries, creating pockets of international space within the borders of individual nation-states. An in-between space, it exists relative to a fixed departure and arrival point, not to the area that surrounds it.

The Transit Lounge is a series of overlapping residencies for Australian and German artists and architects in Berlin. It is also a blog where themes relating to the project will develop, collaborations will be initiated and sustained, and observations on the city collected. The Transit Lounge invites you to participate in these transnational conversations by commenting on the blog.

For more information email us: transit [AT] transitlounge [DOT] org

The transit lounge is supported by Culturia and the DAZ

Sunday, August 19, 2007

RE-PLACE BERLIN: A NEW PROJECT BY TRANSIT LOUNGE + PROGRAM




Commuting to work
Walking the dog around the block
Going to the open air market on sundays
Visiting a family on the weekend

The rituals of everyday life trace regular paths along streets and through buildings, organising the solids and voids of the built environment into narratives and patterns of association. Complicated by memory and social rituals, our experience of the city is of a dynamic place, a stage for public performances and private tragedies, of significant moments and the incredibly mundane. The habits, rituals, and actions of its population, the lived experiences within the city define it as something that is always current, always in constant, random movement.

RE-PLACE BERLIN is a web-based urban project that aims to reveal and celebrate the everyday rituals of Berlin’s inhabitants. For Phase I of the project, residents of Berlin are invited to map out frequent routes from their day-to-day living, recording the regular patterns and particular moments associated with this journey, offering others the opportunity to retrace the city in a way that directly relates to the lived experience of those who dwell there.

While commercially available tour packages tend to reduce a city to a handful of its most famous monuments, RE-PLACE BERLIN invites everyone to become a tourist of someone else's everyday ritual, to document and share some of their observations and discoveries made along the way. These insights, collected in the form of text and images, will be assembled on the website during Phase II – as points of intersection develop between the routes, the city will be remapped as a network of lived experiences.

Through the various stages of the project, RE-PLACE BERLIN seeks to provide a way to understand the city, not only through its built space, but in the way its residents are interacting with it in their daily lives – the routes we follow and the moments where these routes cross, overlap, run parallel or tangent to each other.

Please email us for more information and/or click here to participate.

RE-PLACE BERLIN was initiated by program and transit lounge in the summer of 2007.